The Bulletin # 60SUMMARY
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The Bulletin NUM. 60 * Thu, August 31 2006
> FRONT PAGE A decisive autumn We resume weekly contact with our readers with just two months to go before elections in Parliament that will be decisive for the future of Catalunya. After three years of a tripartite government that can only be considered negative, no-one can doubt that a new era is needed. What we still have to see, what Catalans have to decide on All Saints Day is who will have the responsibility of leading the government: Artur Mas or José Montilla. > EDITORIAL MAS OR MONTILLA
 With just two months to go until elections for the Parliament of Catalunya everything is still up for grabs. The majority of polls give a significant advantage to CiU over the PSC, but they also show that a return of the tripartite government is mathematically possible. Today there is no guarantee that whoever wins the elections will receive the responsibility of forming a government. It is highly likely that everything will depend on a few thousand votes and that is why the electoral campaign that effectively begins with the arrival of September will be decisive.The electoral campaign will have to make all the candidates, and especially the two who have the chance of winning the presidency of the Generalitat, put forward their programmes and explain to the public which future they want for our country. They must explain what they think on key issues such as infrastructures, energy, water, schools, health or immigration. After three years in which these issues have not been seriously dealt with, many of these issues require rapid and decisive action if we want to avoid our welfare being endangered. The analysis of the proposals of each candidate will be an essential element of the tasks of the Fundació Catalunya Oberta until the elections. We will regularly offer to the readers of this bulletin food for thought on these key issues.
But in a campaign there has to be not only concrete proposals but also spirit. A president of the Generalitat is not only responsible for correctly managing the public’s taxes, he or she is also responsible for offering a collective project energising the ambition of civil society. This is how it is all over the world, but it is especially important in a country such as Catalunya that has historically based a good part of its success on the impulse coming from civil society. And that is especially important in a moment such as this in which a new Estatut has to be put into practice and in which the image of Catalunya finds itself in an unusually precarious situation.
We need a government that governs, we need a government that does not suffocate civil society but rather stimulates it, we need a government that returns to Catalans their dignity and pride in being who they are.
> HOOK, LINE AND SINKER  CENTRE D’ESTUDIS D’OPINIÓ. PART 2No control and misinfomation
Before summer, we devoted a hook, line and sinker to how badly the Registre d’Estudis d’Opinió of the Generalitat de Catalunya works. The government made a big fuss over finding two surveys made by the government of the Generalitat in 1998 that were not included in the register of the Estudis d’Opinió. They said that such practices were intolerable and that it showed how the CiU governments wished to hide information from the public. It is easy for the pot to call the kettle black.
Looking through the web sites of the different departments of the Generalitat, it can be seen that right now there are a pile of surveys and polls carried out by the Generalitat in 2004, 2005 and 2006 by the same departments or dependent bodies that have not been registered in the Registre d’Estudis d’Opinió of the Generalitat. Below you can find a list:
Those in charge at the Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió not only take no notice of the current rules governing the registering of opinion polls they carry out, but they also do not care whether people are well-informed. Another example of the lack of control and misinformation that has been at the heart of this government.
Please don’t make us swallow this hook, line and sinker, dear director Colomé!
> HAVE A LOOK  After a hot summer in Cuba where, for a moment, we thought that there could be a change in the fate of the country due to the sudden illness of commandant Castro and where, for that reason, there was hope that the last dictatorship left over from the 20th century was on the verge of disappearing, it seems as if there will be a warm autumn in a different Latin American country. In Mexico, the Electoral Commission this week confirmed the victory of Felipe Calderón, the conservative Partido Acción Nacional candidate, in the elections held on July 2 by a narrow margin of 0.58 per cent of the votes over Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the populist Coalición por el Bien de Todos, and who from the outset had complained of electoral fraud. “Criminals” was how López Obrador dubbed all of his political opponents, according to The New York Times, which also points out that the populist politician would not accept the resolution because he considers it the fruit of a conspiracy to rob him of victory. The newspaper criticises López Obrador in a leader but also reminds Calderón not to leave the millions  of voters who supported his rival without a voice. From the federal capital, the leader of the Diario de México predicts “a serious conflict of interests for the whole country” and El Universal reprints the words of the head of the Federal District government, Alejandro Encinas, who pronounces himself against the use of public force to end the demonstrations by supporters of the beaten candidate and urges the people to reject the class confrontation that has emerged from the recent elections. However, one of the member parties of the Coalición por el Bien de Todos, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, has already demonstrated, as reported in La Crónica de Hoy, that what is needed is for everyone to focus on the consequences, because the left will be radical and the columnist of El Sol de México Salvador Ordaz Montes de Oca reminds us, and not in a good light, of the man on the way out, Vicente Fox. On the other hand, The Washington Post, takes the opportunity to explain the traditional and explosive mix of politics and religion that, historically, have been present in the Aztec country where sacred and profane symbols are manipulated for partisan interests. For example, now there is a wish to mix the figure of the cardinal Norberto Rivera of the archdiocese of the city of Mexico, who figured in the “crossings” as a substitute for John Paul II.The coming months inside the French socialist party will also be busy, as it seems as if the great hope for re-conquering the highest representative post in the country, the seductive Ségolène Royal, is meeting with increasing opposition inside her own ranks. There are even voices that have proposed that the candidate for the presidential elections of 2007 should be her husband, Françoise Hollande, given his position as Chief Secretary of the political party. Nevertheless, Le Figaro thinks that “Everything helps Ségolène”, if the polls are taken into consideration, even though they warn of the dangerous irruption of Lionel Jospin, absolutely contrary to the interests of Royal and with important standing among the grassroots because of his veteran status in politics.
Another fated to suffer – in fact a leader in The Guardian states that he has spent the whole summer doing so, praying that the holiday period brings to an end at least some of the difficulties he is going through. Tony Blair, according to the paper, with little more than 18 months since the electorate renewed his mandate, sees his popular support decline every day. The press is fed up and is only interested in his successor and the conservatives are rising over labour in the polls, after an August that has once more brought to the forefront the issue of Islamic terrorism and British foreign policy. Connected with these two issues, surrounding the attempted attack detected this summer in the London airport of Heathrow, presumed to be by Islamists, the leader writer of Corriere della Sera, Angelo Panebianco, reflects on multicultural policies and calls on the Italian government, as well as other countries, to rethink the objectives they want them to attain. Panebianco mentions an article published by the Nobel prize-winner for Economics and Premi Catalunya winner Amartya Sen in the Financial Times,
 which attributes the degeneration of multicultural policies to the appearance of an Islamic subculture that is alien and hostile to Great Britain, even though he does not rule out that the focus of these same multicultural policies could be the true cause of this alienation. One issue, also in The Guardian has Timothy Garton Ash giving his point of view on why French Muslims identify much more with their country more than do their British equivalents.The summer was also marked in the international sphere by the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. The Lebanese newspaper L’Orient le jour takes to task, naturally, the Israelis with a play on words on the term ‘moral’. For the paper, to talk about questions such as the morale of the troops is nothing more than rhetoric when one reality is a devastated Lebanon. The word, moral, by the way “grates in the mouth of Ehud Olmert invoking before the ‘knesset’ the ‘moral obligation’ of going forward with the liquidation of Hezbollah”. But it is not only the press that is against Israel that is critical of the Israeli prime minister. The progressive newspaper Jerusalem Post pulls no punches: “The Olmert government has to resign”, is the headline, while The Economist explains why the Americans give unconditional support to Israel. All of them? Well, perhaps not the members of the Arab American Institute Foundation, a lobby that is the only organisation in the United States that promotes the participation of the Arab North Americans in the electoral system of the US, and which will put forward a pool of candidates in the next elections for the Chamber of Representatives. In any case, as far as the conflict is concerned, they have not lined up with either side, although they have signed a petition calling for a cease-fire. Among the signatories can be found the famous singer Paul Anka and actor F. Murray Abraham, who played Salieri in the Milos Forman film “Amadeus”. The one who seems least sure, however, is the one that gets the most attention. The New York Times explains, on the one hand, the different reasons why Hezbollah will not give up its weapons and the same New York newspaper assures us that on both left and right, the Israelis are in favour of the war, while at the same time reporting on the lack of enthusiasm generated by the European countries to send UN Blue Helmets.
We could soon see the end of the few arguments left to those who oppose research into stem cells. One of the reasons to oppose it, the moral and religious reason, was based on the fact that to develop embryonic stem cells it was necessary to destroy human embryos. Now, this obstacle might become a thing of the past, reports The Washington Post, because a group of scientists has managed to develop stem cells using a technique that does not involve the destruction of embryos, the results of which were published in the magazine Nature. Despite that, some doubts can be discerned in the Nature article that have re-ignited objections and begun a controversy in scientific and religious circles, according to the same newspaper. In a leader in The New York Times it is made clear that the scientific community has difficulties and has always given way before religious conservatism that has managed to impose its moral vision. And again, The Washington Post wonders whether it will be possible to go ahead with the experiments: if is proved that, finally, there is no need for the ethical conflict,
 president Bush will be able to make it easier to carry out research, if not, he will continue with his firm position against this possibility.Pluto has been downgraded. The International Astronomic Union has decided to take away its status as a planet because its characteristics do not correspond to the new definition. “And then there were eight” says the editorial of The New York Times in reference to the group of planets that make up the Solar System since the decision, once the downgraded planet was given the status of “dwarf”. This situation has affected the astrological community, who will have to find a way of reconciling the change with questions such as lucky numbers or the possibilities of getting a date on Saturday night. These are aspects that The Wall Street Journal focuses on when reporting the news. But, the doomed planet will always get support... from The Washington Post.
Like the support the capitalist system gets by the feminist capitalist movement revealed by the Financial Times, which defines it as a powerful alliance between the impulse of the markets and the talent, ambitions and desires of 50 per cent of the population which is now free of the ties of certain legal and social obstacles inherited from the previous millennium.” Economic prosperity has also come to the middle classes in India and the most obvious way of exhibiting this new situation of, let us say, opulence is in the size of the waistlines of this social group. But not all is sweetness and light, as indicated by the Indian electronic newspaper Outlookindia.com: obviously health problems also make themselves felt. Perhaps the solution is to ask for a diet with an SMS to one of the different companies that offer this service free. Thus, as The Wall Street Journal says, all the time there are more who, wanting to lose a few kilos, order a a recipe to help them achieve their objectives. However, the system has its critics, such as the spokesman of the American Dietetic Association, Christine Gerbstadt, who does not guarantee that the system provides a healthy diet. Continuing with gastronomy, we do not know if it is healthy or not but in any case it is politically incorrect, which is to eat foie gras in Chicago, where the council banned it in April.
 Since August 22, eating this food has been considered being cruel to animals. To protest against this measure, The Washington Post reports that many of the city’s restaurants put together a menu with foie gras as the main ingredient, the day before the ban came into effect, which had been inspired by similar measures in the European Union. Europe, specifically France, has copied the United States with an idea related to gastronomy. “First it was Beaujolais noveau. Now it is ‘nouveau’ beer” begins the news in The Wall Street Journal, which explains how, based on the production of wine from extremely young vines, beer is made from equally young barley.We mentioned the issue of mobile phone messages, but now let’s return to them because it seems that, similar to what happened in Catalunya and Spain after the Madrid March 11 attacks in 2004, in the Filipines the infinite possibilities for protest using SMS messaging has been discovered reports The Washington Post.
We finish with two issues in the field of economics. A study carried out by Mastercard, reported in the Financial Times says that the winners of the Champions League this year could increase their income by 100 million euros, merely for being the champions. As we all know, in this case the beneficiary would be Futbol Club Barcelona. However, foreign companies who want to do business in China will have a harder time making money. The same financial newspaper explains the case of the Carlyle group that, in its attempts to invest in that Asian country, came across nice words at the start which have since turned into setbacks.
Joan Clos for José Montilla and Jordi Hereu for Joan Clos. These are the surprise last-minute appointments even though the first was secretly agreed in July and the second was obvious, because of the traditional working of the municipal socialist machinery.
 After commenting on the merits of Joan Clos for becoming the industry minister, Salvador Sostres (Avui, Wednesday) goes on to talk about the appointment of Jordi Hereu as the new mayor of Barcelona, criticising “this irritating habit of the socialists of believing that they already know what is good for us without even needing to ask”.For his part, Joan Oliver comments in the same newspaper on “the removal of Clos disguised as an appointment as the Spanish Industry minister” and states that “this debases the image of the PSOE government. The only thing they have thought about is that in the Barcelona City Council the man at the top will be one of theirs”.
One institution, the municipal, this summer has been in the spotlight surrounding the controversy loosed by IC-V and supported by the socialists, in proposing to the Deputy’s Congress the possibility that immigrants from outside the European Union should be able to vote in municipal elections once they had been given nationality. Jordi Cabré (El Punt, Saturday) focuses on the “bungling, twisted and opportunist” manipulation that the extreme left makes of the Pujolian maxim that says whoever lives and works in Catalunya is Catalan. “Mr Saura,” says Cabré, “knows perfectly that during the eighties it was not about coming up with an idea of legal citizenship but rather an idea of national co-existence”.
Someone who has found a way of exposing the populist spouting on immigration is Jordi Graupera (Avui, Saturday). This is how he does it: “When I talk to someone about immigration, sexism or exploitation in the workplace, I like to ask them if they have a cleaning lady and where she is from. The question I like the most, though, is: does the cleaning lady have a contract? Or papers? Surprise, surprise most of them prefer to change the subject and go back to talking about their holidays.”
Which is something that our politicians will not be able to do (maybe the IC-V ones can but there is no reference to them) if we are to believe the series “Sense vacances” in the newspaper Vicent Sanchis heads and which appeared from the last Sunday in July and through the whole of August. For Sanchis, CiU (July 30) has not had any holidays because, despite the good omens for November 1, “there is no way that it is already won”; PSC (August 6), because “they are the ones with most to lose in the coming elections”; the government (August 13) because it has “decided to award annual subsidies to ‘projects’ (sic) that are journalistic (Further on, he explains that in the distribution, “the team in charge of Avui is very grateful...”); ERC (August 20) because
 it has understood that “the coming elections are vital for the project it represents” and, if before we said that Sanchis did not mention IC-V, we should point out that he does make reference to the PP (August 27), but to say that they are the only ones to have had any holidays: “from the first week of August, the leaders of the Partit Popular disappeared from the political scene.”Nor was the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, present at certain events that appear to bother him. Valentí Puig (ABC, Thursday) assures us that “Zapatero leaves the public stages that, in symbolic terms, revolve around the idea of using force against the enemy, of the postulates of self defence, of the military function that goes beyond the aims of any NGO.”
All of this could go hand in hand with progressive youth which opts for “outlandish clothing, music, piercings, demonstrations against the war in Iraq and statements playing to the gallery” is the opinion of Francesc Puigpelat (Avui, Sunday) after reading a study published on young people and work in Spain, which concludes that the majority of them want to be civil servants, with a fixed timetable and working from home and only a minority aspire to having a job that presented a challenge.
 Another type of publication, this time a manifesto for independence for Flanders from Belgium, leads Ramon Tremosa in El Temps to reflect on the sense that “when the economy indicates a change of rhthym who knows what can happen.”It is the cinema and not letters that is the basis of the commentary by Ferran Sáez in Avui on Saturday. In looking back on the film Annie Hall by Woody Allen, the columnist notes “a preventative attitude against political correctness” and “a sarcasm against all the progressive-macrobiotic-orientalists who, whether we like it or not, have ended up imposing themselves as a type of lunatic cultural model.”
Wherever there is good wine there are gastronomic curiosities. Thus, it is wonderful to discover that “this year, which has been so dry, promises a harvest of excellent quality”, according to Oriol Pi de Cabanyes (La Vanguardia, Wednesday), in an article where he also explains the origin of the Malvasia vines that came to Sitges during the time of the Almogavers.
Viewpoint
THE TIME OF THE CATALANS HAS COME
 What does this electoral slogan mean? I leave to one side the negative interpretation it would imply if used by the Convergència candidate. Used by the Socialist candidate, and wanting to understand it in a positive light, it must be an exhortation to the people, the citizens, that the hour of abstract politics has passed, the so-called identity question, which according to many is what has distracted attention during the debate on the new Estatut from the great things the tripartite government has done or the great issues that interest it.The time for the Catalans has come, they say, and not that of Catalunya. It is time for concrete things, practical thngs, the time of hard and fast management and not the time to turn the nation into a political football or the time for reinforcing its personality and self-government. It is as if the time of the Catalans was not also the time of Catalunya, in that it is the sum of its citizen parts, as if it cannot also be the time of an ambitious collective project of co-existence and integration, which is what has always been the impulse for Catalanism in all its guises.
But the time of the Catalans has to also be the time of Catalunya. The time of a Catalunya that continues to be a political subject but also an economic and cultural one. A population or a territory can be managed, and can even be managed well, but that is not enough: you have to know how to include everything in a project for the future that does not forget the past. What is true of people is also true of communities, and even territories, they all have their own personality.
Catalunya, considered as a whole, has its interests. Now, during the time of the Catalans, Pasqual Maragall exhorts the Socialist Party of Catalunya that he leads to form a single group in Congress. That would be a good way of seeing the specificity of Catalan socialism. And of the existence of a socialist party in Catalunya with national sensibilities prepared to consider Catalunya as something else to be managed like managing a Diputació or a City Council.
It is surely true that for years there has been an inflation in rhetoric and talk and we have become distracted by theoretical oratory about whether Catalanism and nationalism represent different and even opposite things. “A socialist nationalist has never been seen” one populist cried out in public. No, never. Blair is not an English nationalist and Mitterrand was no French nationalist nor Bono a Spanish nationalist.
The future of Catalunya more than ever depends on the ability of Catalan socialism to maintain it specificity. To continue maintaining the difficult balance between today’s Catalans and a national Catalunya, not merely a provincial one. The conceptual reduction of Catalunya to a mere autonomous region to be managed would go not against socialism in Catalunya but Catalan socialism. Some would like to simply substitute it for Spanish socialism in Catalunya. Turning the PSC into a simple Catalan Federation of the PSOE (which, by the way, during the dictatorship had no sort of role in Catalunya).
The antinationalism that some preach is, in fact, viscerally anti-Catalanist ethnicism. “Socialism,” some wrongly argue, “is the opposite of nationalism. Socialism defends people and not territories. It is concerned with people’s practical problems not by symbolic ones”. That is a good one! And the huge Spanish flag in the centre of Madrid is not at all symbolic. Nor did the “reconquest” of Perejil have anything symbolic about it. As for September 11, that is merely symbolic, as is the Estatut
I read that some of these visceral anti-Catalanists suggest that “socialism is rational, not sentimental”, etc. For them “the time of the Catalans” must be the time of the Catalans prepared not to act as such and be willing to dissolve themselves as a community with its own profile. “Do I insinuate,” it has been said, “that the Catalan socialists have to give up any power? If the alliance with the radicals leads, as it seems, to the betrayal of socialist principles, I have no doubts: better to keep one’s dignity in opposition than debase oneself with power.”
The time of the Catalans must be the time of the management of their interests, the time of rolling out the Estatut, naturally, but also the time for ambition in the development of a national personality that is inspired as much by ideas as feelings. Among the latter the feeling of love for a certain place is not to be done down, the feeling of belonging to a society with rights and duties or to intergenerational solidarity.
THE VOTE OF NON-COMMUNITY IMMIGRANTS
 One of the defining characteristics of decadent societies is their surprising capacity for generating sterile collective debates and, at the same time, shying away from others that it makes make more sense to discuss because, among other reasons, they are urgent. This August we have witnessed a perfectly absurd debate on the possibility of giving the vote in certain elections to people from outside the European Union but who live and/or work in Spain. That “outside the European Union“ should be underlined because I have read at least two articles that appear to ignore the official difference between the fact of possessing a passport from a country that is a member of the European Union and not having one. This, however, is not the main thing, the debate has degenerated for reasons I shall go on to detail.One error has, through repeating it over and over, ended up becoming accepted fact. This is the interpretation of the expression “equality of rights”. Allow me to begin with an illustration that I believe will aid understanding. If someone stops me from voting in the coming elections in the Parlament of Catalunya they would be seriously violating my rights (because I fullfil all the requisites to do so): but if they were to prevent me from flying a plane, for example, they would be committing no infringement (because I do not fullfil the requirements to do so). It is true that I do have the right to be able to learn how to fly a plane (first by signing up to a flying school, etc) but this fact in itself does not mean I can fly a plane, as and when I want. The infringement of rights, then, can come about when trying to access this right (for example, in the case that my enrolment was turned down for racist or sexist reasons, but not directly.
I am not comparing the two aforementioned situations, which in fact have no relation; I am merely trying to show that all rights, without exception, presuppose previous requisites. All over the civilised world, people who do not have certain requisites are not allowed certain rights and, as a consequence, logically, the problem does not lay in the rights themselves but in the requisites. These requisites are laid out in the law of the land – whether in the right to vote or the right to run a partridge farm for profit – which can be easily changed. It is simply a question of political will and, at the end of the day, social consensus. Thus, what should the new requisites and their consequences be?
There has been much talk about the first question; about the second, very little. To my understanding, the argument that serves as a starting point naturally leads to two delicate points. According to this argument, it is not fair that someone who legally works, generates wealth, pays taxes, etc. in a certain place should not have the right to participate in decisions that affect them. This is undoubtedly the situation of many from outside the European Union, but also that of thousands of Spanish workers of 16 or 17 years of age (who also pay taxes, etc). The argument, thus, is perfectly plausible but formulated like this, it should also in all justice be true for the above mentioned social group.
Secondly, this issue inexorably leads us to another that is rather complicated: that of international reciprocity. Someone from Argentina or Morocco who is resident in Spain is still a citizen of their own country of origin, with all the rights and duties that go with it, but at the same time they are subject to the laws of the host country. A legislative change here would have to mean a symmetrical change in the country of origin, so that a citizen of Buenos Aires could vote in Barcelona, and a citizen of Barcelona could vote in Buenos Aires. If that were not the case, the equality implied in a legislative change of this type would be more than questionable.
By all means let us debate. But please, let us not forget the consequences of beginning a frivolous discussion and where that might lead.
> RECOMMENDED LINKS
The prestigious North American university of Yale has taken the initiative of dealing with the issue of globalisation and have thus set up the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, devoted to debate and thinking about this phenomenon which will undoubtedly make its mark on the still new 21st century. A new century and millenium which saw the birth of this organisation in 2001 and whose president was also that of Mexico between 1994 and 2000, Ernesto Zedillo.
Before one can debate a subject it is necessary to know it inside out, the web site of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization offers us the possibility of finding out about the significance of the issue. It provides us with a run-throuogh of the history of globalisation and also offers us summaries and reviews of books that talk about the matter. At the same time, and pertaining more to the here and now, the organisation also publishes a bulletin, YaleGlobal Online, basically composed of articles with the opinions of the experts in the field.
Another aspect to highlight is the multimedia archive on the abovementioned web site. This contains a section devoted to video where we can follow conferences by the secretary general of the UN, Kofi Annan, the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, or the former winner of the journalism prize of the Fundació Catalunya Oberta, Martin Wolf, who speaks about his reflections published under the title, Why globalization works.
The electronic forums on different subjects and the possibility of subscribing to a bulletin produced by the Center are other options that this institution offers that also has as its aim, apart from those things mentioned above, the building of bridges between the academic and political worlds through collaboration with institutions outside of the university sphere.
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